School tragedies won't end

 I - It is not a question of expertise, is it?

I am not an expert on education. I am not an expert on physical and land use planning. I am not a parent. However, seeing this, maybe I know a thing about laws.

School tragedies are shockingly commonplace in Kenya. Regardless of whether they are supported out of our taxes or private, national or ho-hum, well performing or at the bottom of the exam rankings, tragedies strike them all without discrimination. It has nothing to do with how wealthy or poor Kenya is, tragedy will find a school.

II - The thing about systems

Schools, like so much else in Kenya, exist and operate in a system. The system is broken. It has been broken for decades. We know the ways it is broken. Crucially, those who know better, know how to fix that which is broken. But equally crucially, those with the power to do anything about it don’t. More often than not, it all boils down to money. Specifically, tax shillings, collected and spent by the government.

The only governments we believed we had a say in how they came about, whom they appointed to high office, and which we thought represented our aspirations as a people are Mwai Kibaki’s, Uhuru Kenyatta’s and William Ruto’s. Daniel Moi’s and Jomo Kenyatta’s governments were renown for the extremes they went to suppress the aspirations of the people. We even called them “imperial presidencies” in recognition of how they treated the people: as subjects, rather than citizens.

III - Hopes, dashed

But in 2002, Kenyans voted overwhelmingly to cast aside presidential imperialism. In 2010, Kenyans voted again overwhelmingly to cast aside constitutional imperialism. And in 2013, knowing what we knew, elected the first government under a new freedom-espousing constitutional order, repeating the feat again in 2022.

So far, the only difference between the Jomo/Moi era and the Kibaki/Uhuru/Ruto era is the slick PR machine that springs into action to pull the wool over our eyes whenever our children are maimed and killed in school tragedies. In my opinion, in order to safeguard the lives and welfare of our children, then we must be prepared to rend asunder the national economic compact that says it is better to wastefully spend billions on roads for corrupt UN fat cats instead of the necessary infrastructure to properly and adequately educate our children in safety and security.

IV - The money we have, the money we waste

The Appropriation Act, a constitutional requirement under Article 221 of the Constitution, is the most important tool in directing how we spend the taxes we collect. All the mealy-mouthed excused about World Bank/IMF conditionalities and repayments of loans are just that - excuses. If we want to spend public funds to educate our children in safety and security, then we must take a hatchet to all the wastefulness contained in the annual Appropriation Act. So long as this not done, no amount of handwringing by the political classes will ever provide the necessary resources. And tragedies will follow. To paraphrase the devolution windbags - lack of money follows tragedy

History as farce, history as tragedy

In 2020, when it became apparent that the Government would not chart an independent path in dealing with the spread of the Covid 19 virus, a decision was made to revoke and replace the Petroleum Development Levy Fund Order of 1992 (Legal Notice No. 10 of 1992). What replaced it, the Petroleum Development Levy Fund Order of 2020 (Legal Notice No. 124 of 2020) created the “fuel subsidy” that came to bedevil the Government’s finances.

Paragraph 5 of the new Order stated:

5. 5. The levy shall also be used for matters relating to the development of the oil industry including to stabilize local petroleum pump prices in instances of spikes occasioned by high landed costs above a threshold determined by the Authority. The Cabinet Secretary may by writing to the administrator, request for a draw down from the Petroleum Development Fund to stabilize local petroleum pump prices where he deems it necessary.

It would be instructive to remind ourselves what the purpose of the Petroleum Development Fund Act was. Section 4(4) of the Act states:

(4) There shall be paid out of the Fund such monies as are necessary for the development of common facilities for the distribution or testing of oil products and for matters relating to the development of oil industry as the Cabinet Secretary may direct:

Provided that the funds are not used for purposes in competition with the private sector.

The subsidy programme did not fall within the broad purposes of the Act, to wit, the development of common facilities for the distribution or testing of oil products and for matters relating to the development of oil industry, but because fuel prices had spiked so sharply because of the supply chain shocks caused by the global pandemic, few Kenyans were willing to push back on the Government’s decision.

So it beggars belief that another global supply shock that has occasioned a sharp spike in fuel prices has not motivated the Government to draw down from the Petroleum Development Fund to stabilize local petroleum pump prices. The situation may not be exactly the same - pandemic versus war - but the outcome is the same: high fuel prices. The fund exists. The power to draw down from the fund remains. The reluctance by the Government to do something meaningful is baffling. Unless, of course, the Fund is “empty”.

Kenya is a very strange place, from a statutory perspective. It has a plethora of tax laws that seem to affect the price of fuel, the most obvious being value added tax, excise duty, import declaration fee, road maintenance levy, and petroleum development levy. It has a byzantine system for importing petroleum products: anyone who can explain what the G-to-G system is and what it does and how it provides for predictable (and low prices) deserves an actual Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Despite all that, and the shenanigans of the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, there is not predictable way of cushioning Kenyans from high fuel prices and the knock-on effects on the cost of living. Instead, we get haughty harangues from the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury and stoic silence from the Cabinet Secretary for Energy. We get snooty highfalutin screeds from the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. We get spectacularly tone-deaf social media posts from pro-government “bloggers”. What we don’t get is any form of amelioration for our challenges.

And because the “united opposition” is composed of a deposed deputy president with he support of probably only his wife and immediate family, a perennially red-eyed doddering geriatric in charge of the “biggest opposition party”, the first serious woman presidential candidate long past her prime, an ex-CJ presidential candidate with the support of a thimbleful of GenZ activists, a narcissistic activist-senator who never seems to do any work in the Senate, an ex-VP with a massive chip on his puny shoulders, and an agglomeration of political wannabes and has-beens, amelioration will not be forthcoming any time soon. Many Kenyans now feel like Robert Baratheon on his death bed.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers

The Constitution of Kenya was written by lawyers. And it shows. It should have been written by ordinary Kenyans first, and then the lawyers could thereafter have had their way with the legal weaselling...reasoning. The Fourth Schedule to the Constitution deals with the distribution of functions between her national government and county governments. Paragraph 1 of Part 1 states that the national government shall perform functions relating to foreign affairs, foreign policy and international trade.

The Fourth Schedule contains a list with 48 items, 34 functions of the national government and 14 functions of county governments. The lawyers who compiled the list were not thinking of the opening words of the Preamble of the Constitution - We, the people of Kenya. It is why functions relating to how humans live and work are treated as afterthoughts - while things that inevitably lead to the exercise of governmental powers take precedence.

You can see this in the way the Africa Forward Summit (Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth) held on the 11th and 12 May, 2026, was conceived, promoted, and held, and how the decisions by the international worthies were made. Some commentators have thoughtfully explained the implications of the whole kit and caboodle, especially in light of the violent fracturing of Françafrique in West Africa and the weight of colonial history that the Summit attempted to slough off its shoulders. If the lawyers had resisted the powerful instinct to lawyer-ise the Constitution, we may not be having such a difficult time in explaining why neo-Françafrique poses such fraught questions for us.

Many well-meaning lawyers, such as the indefatigable Dr. Willy Mutunga, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kenya, tried their best to place We, the people of Kenya, at the heart of the Constitution. They did not succeed. They did not even come close to succeeding. because their fellow-lawyers had laid such terrible constitutional traps for them to evade.

Take the question of who is and who isn't eligible to stand in a Kenyan election. Kenyans are staring in horror at the lawyerly protection conferred on all sorts of shady men and women. The words all possibility of appeal or review of the relevant sentence or decision has been exhausted found in Article 99(3) and Article 193(3) are a warm security blanket that lawyers sitting in the constitutional court will wrap around the shoulders of the put-upon politicians with dodgy criminal records seeking elected office. If We, the people of Kenya, had been asked to decide who should or shouldn't be eligible to stand in a Kenyan election, no way would they have added that caveat about appeals and reviews. No way, José! But we were not and at least two alleged child sex abusers (that we know of) sit in the national legislature.

One of the most egregious signs that the Constitution was written by lawyers is the Preamble. Kenyan lawyers, even the ones who have had the opportunity to attend the very best schools, universities and colleges the world has to offer, are notorious for copying other lawyers' work. The Preamble is a pale imitation of the United States Declaration of Independence, the Indian Constitution's Preamble, and the South African Constitution's Preamble, garnished, garishly, by a smattering of Kenyan-style constitutional lawyering. It is a a dog's breakfast, redeemed only by the fact that it is mercifully short. If there were any lawyers that said, "Let's not," they were either not persuasive, or they were easily ignored. I find the allusions to an Almighty God of all creation particularly crass because if we truly believed in the rights of ALL Kenyans to think and believe as they wish, We, the people, would not be declaring as a fact that [a] there is a God, [b] that the God is "almighty" and [c] the God created "all". We, the people, I would like to think, would have asked, "What about my fellow Kenyan who does not believe gods exist?"

In another twenty to thirty years, Kenyans will replace this Constitution. I hope that they will have learnt hard lessons: keep the lawyers away from the process. Better yet, in the words of Mr. Shakespeare as written in Henry VI, Part 2 - Act 4, scene 2, The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!

The west is the bad guy

It is almost impossible to avoid adopting the language of the war-mongering "west". But every now and then, someone says something that gives you hope that it can be done. I watched a recent YouTube video in which a UK radio talking head called Shelagh Fogarty was interviewing Prof. Mohamed Marandi about the US-Israel war on Iran. She described him as being "close to the Iranian regime". When he called her out for the way she had phrased things, she tried to walk it back by saying that he had "access to Iranian government officials" the same as she to UK government officials. But when he asked her why she referred to the Iranian government as a "regime" but did not call the UK government a "regime, she swiftly moved on to a different topic.

We have been programmed to accept the presumption that the "west" are the good guys in all wars and that whoever they happen to be waging war on is the bad guy. We have also been programmed to accept that the Jewish state, located in West Asia, is part of the "west" and, therefore, any country it wages war on must, of necessity, be the bad guy and the Jewish state is the good guy. Obviously, among many quarters, that presumption is considered to be arrant bullshit.

We are encouraged, even today, to consider the nature of the Islamic Republic only through the lens of the "west" aka the United States and Israel, and to ignore everything the "west" has done to the Islamic Republic since the end of the Second World War. When viewed particularly through the lens provided by the United States, the Islamic Republic is made up of terrorists whose perfidy is beyond doubt because US nationals were taken hostage in Iran during the 1978 revolution that brought down the puppet regime that had been imposed on Iranian people by the United States and United Kingdom.

The liberation movements that the Islamic Republic has supported, particularly in Palestine, have been branded "terrorists" for opposing the continued occupation of Palestine by the Jewish state and for the continued illegal dispossession of Palestinians through so-called "settlements". Those with historical perspectives can see parallels in the way the British continue to occupy Northern Ireland and the United States refuses to relinquish its hold over the Chagos Islands.

So it is no surprise that a Briton, steeped in the [un]righteous assumption that White Is Right, would automatically brand the government of the islamic Republic as a "regime" with all the negative connotations of that branding and not do the same with the government of Perfidious Albion, a government that has supported in word and deed the waging of an unjust war of aggression against the Islamic Republic.

The world is slowly abandoning old assumptions because of the way the "west" has conducted itself in West Asia. The scales are falling from our eyes as we witness nuclear-armed belligerents fail, time and again, to browbeat the Islamic Republic into submissions, a failure that stretches back to the Islamic Revolution, a failure that has laid bare the impotency of their nuclear arsenals. Maybe the "west" will prevail, but even if it does, it will be at great cost to it and its peoples. More significantly, more and more peoples will begin to accept the assumption that the "west" is really the bad guy.

Charles Kanjama is one more reason to abolish the Law Society of Kenya

Charles Kanjama, Senior Counsel, was elected as the 7th president of the Law Society of Kenya on the 19th February, 2026. He is a throwback to previous chairmen of the Law Society who could not be trusted to take a firm stand if it meant taking a stand against the excesses of the government of the day. Instead, they would find well-reasoned arguments for why their hands were tied and how Kenyans should seek succour from other institutions of government like the police, the statutory human rights organisations, national and international NGOs and, when all those had failed, the Law Society. In their minds, the Law Society was always the last resort.

Little of the campaign for the LSK presidency was interesting. All the candidates, regardless of their human rights bona fides, were united in one mission though: the construction of Wakili Tower, a multi-million shillings white elephant "to be financed out of contributions by members". Since the Erick Mutua presidency, every single LSK council has assiduously worked towards a grand real estate project. First it was at the LSK's South C property and now it is the Gitanga Road HQ that is being turned into a construction site.

Focus for Mr. Kanjama and his new council, will be on the construction of Wakili Tower and anything that draws focus away from it, like human rights campaigns, will receive only a cursory glance, if at all. The Law Society is a pale shadow of the force of nature it was in the 1980s when its leadership and its members risked life, limb, freedom and livelihoods to campaign for the rights of prisoners of conscience and other victims of human rights abuses by the state and agents of the state.

The outgoing president, Ms. Faith Odhiambo, did her best with a dying Law Society. She led a brave campaign in 2024 to hold the government accountable for enforced disappearances, unlawful detentions, malicious prosecutions and other forms of state-sanctioned criminality. But it was clear that she stood mostly alone; few of the members of her council were as publicly committed as she was and fewer of the LSK branches were as dedicated as she was. Mr. Kanjama has inherited a presidency that is no longer a beacon of hope for the oppressed.

The decline of the Law Society can be traced, ironically, to the triumphal election of Mwai Kibaki in December 2002. His election pulled the wool over our eyes that because Kanu had been defeated, Kanu-ism was over. Instead, Mr. Kibaki moved swiftly to consolidate his political power and one way he did this was to co-opt the leadership and senior members of the Law Society into governmental institutions culminating in the biggest prize of them all: chairman of the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board which heard disputes between the government and private contractors where billions of shillings were at stake. Needless to say, the rule of law provided a very wide fig leaf to hide the alleged corruption in the Kibaki regime that ensued.

Dozens of lawyers became fabulously wealthy because of the contracts they won from the government. The Law Society became quieter and quieter even as Kenyans continued to be abducted and murdered by policemen and intelligence officers. Mr. Kanjama does not inspire confidence that he will lead the Law Society to reclaim its role in holding the government to account for the acts of omission and commission of the government and agents of the government that have led to the loss of life, grievous injuries, corruption and human rights abuses.

Members of the Law Society also do not seem interested in rebuilding the image of the Law Society. They have been sold a bill of goods that the Law Society is a "trade union for lawyers" and that the Law Society should focus more in ensuring "better terms for lawyers" as if the Advocates Remuneration Order did not exist and ignoring the fact that the practice of law before the courts is the exclusive, monopolistic preserve of the members the Law Society in good standing.

The Law Society is an anachronism. It is time we admitted this to ourselves, repealed the Law Society of Kenya Act, abolished the Law Society in its current iteration, and rebuilt the Law Society anew as a professional body of advocates holding its members to the highest professional and ethical standards - and campaigning with vim and vigour for the highest attainable standards of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The last days of white supremacy

From the moment Jesse Jackson (1941 - 2026) sought the nomination of the Democratic Party to run in the 1988 US presidential election, the US has been reorienting its racism in ways that would camouflage how deeply abhorrent it felt about Black peoples. One of the ways in which it reorganised was to sort out the tokenism that had prevailed since 1968. That tokenism culminated in the election of the whitest Black man as the 44th president of the US, a man who served two full terms and cemented the latest iteration of white-power racism in the US.

President Obama was the wrong Black man at the wrong time. If the US had wanted to wholly break with its racism, it should have nominated and elected Jesse Jackson instead of George H.W. Bush. It didn't, and set the stage for the most racist modern US federal government since Ronald Reagan's. What is worse, because it elected the empty suit that is Mr. Obama, it set the stage for the least educated and most racist president in modern times to be elected twice over, and because of his spectacular illiteracy, the world faces the spectre of global war.

The world is much changed since the last global war. Yet so much remains the same.

The white man, in his infinite and bottomless arrogance, cannot fathom a world in which the Black and Brown man could deign to defy his feudalistic and capitalistic dictats. While the white man's gunboats of the 18th century were actual boats with guns, the gunboats of the 21st century are intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles bearing multiple multi-tonne nuclear warheads capable of destroying the wold a thousand times over. The old gunboats could lay siege to a city at a time. The modern ones have laid siege to the whole world for nigh on fifty years.

In 1953, US and UK capitalist interests connived to depose the democratically elected government of Iran, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1978 and a state of war between Iran and the US that shows no sign of ending in peace. The US, in addition to the other colonial wars it has waged since 1947, has waged a political, economic, cultural and military war against Iran that has resulted in great instability throughout West Asia. The war has often been fought through, and by, proxies. In June 2025, the war became a direct war when the US and Israel launched attacks on the Iranian homeland.

The publicly stated reason for the attacks was Iran's so-called nuclear programme. The real reason is that the white world needed a military lesson to teach the Blacks and the Browns. The white world needed to remind the rest of the world that it could inflict punishment, severe punishment, as and when it chose and for any reason, and that no amount of hand-wringing about "international law" would have any kind of meaning to the white world. White supremacy has seen the writing on the wall: in thirty years, it will no longer be a world power. In fifty years, it will no longer be the wealthiest. In seventy years, it will be a footnote of history. As it had been for the 1,800 years before the first Spanish, Portuguese, French and British "explorers" set sail for the "new world".

The natural order of things has always been for the peoples of the world who have had no reason to pillage and destroy to be the ones to prosper and bring civilisation to the uncivilised and barbaric white world. I recently heard an interesting statement: wherever the white man finds himself, his natural instinct is to destroy. Look at East and Central Africa as an example. The white man found entire cultures that were flourishing and chose to destroy them, their languages, their religions, their forests, their wildlife...their very way of life...in the name of Christian civilisation. That instinct to destroy has not changed in 500 years and, going by the recent war on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, that instinct will never change.

The US is the modern bellwether of white supremacism. Mr. Obama, the token Black president, is proof. The rearguard attempt by white supremacy to paint a veneer of racial comity failed abjectly. The US elected an uneducated misbegotten monster as its white champion in the hopes that he would lead the charge in forestalling the decline of the white man. Instead, the US has affirmed for the whole Black world to see, that white supremacy is dying, and dying much faster than they thought.

These are not serious people

The Orange Democratic Movement Party of Kenya (ODM) is a pale shadow of the political movement that defeated the Banana side during the 2005 constitutional referendum. It has been in steady decline from the date it buried the hatchet with Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity and joined a Grand Coalition Government. It started kicking its last kicks of relevance when it led the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy into a defeat, and cemented its place as an also-ran political party when the Azimio One Kenya fell to the Kenya Kwanza onslaught. On the 11th February, of 2026, it affirmed to itself that it is no longer a serious political party and should be treated with the same pity one treats the slow learners in school.

The decision by the party's high command to turn a stop-gap arrangement in which the geriatric Oburu Odinga was a placeholder for a young a dynamic leader into a permanent sinecure was to be expected. The late Raila Odinga had tried to build a cadre of young politicians who could challenge for senior leadership in the political party and failed. So, in the absence of credible young guns to take Raila's place, Oburu was the most logical, if stupidest, choice. It wouldn't be so bad if he had any sort of dynamism about him. He doesn't and it is quite terrible to see.

What is worse is the foolishness of the political party to thin its leadership ranks simply because it does not know how to manage ambitious politicians. The decision to sack Edwin Sifuna as its secretary-general is asinine; his replacement by an unknown councillor is imbecilic. Sifuna is a hard-charger. You only need to watch videos of him savaging Kenya Kwanza infants on TV for you to appreciate what he could have brought to the political party. He has charisma by the bucket and for all his manoeuvring and conspiring, he appeared committed to the political party that had given him a national profile.

The shortsighted men and women in charge of party strategy - Junet, Wanga, Nassir, Winnie and Oburu - are so focussed in keeping their noses in the Kenya Kwanza trough, they no longer seem to care that Kenya Kwanza is hell-bent on turning itself into the new KANU with the intention of ruling Kenya for the next twenty-four years. If that happens, not only will the ODM-ites lose their privileged access to the trough, they will lose everything they have amassed over the past fifteen years and they will be lucky if their leading lights don't spend the entirety of the Kenya Kwanza reign fighting all sorts of criminal charges in the law courts.

The red herring that ODM is chasing after - Uhuru Kenyatta's meddling in the Azimio leadership and whatnot - reveals the dearth of strategic thinking at the highest levels of the political party leadership. Uhuru is not the equivalent of Cardinal Richelieu, pulling strings behind the scenes to achieve some grand political agenda; he is a very young ex-president with too much money and time on his hands and a massive chip on his shoulder about the man who bested his pet project at the hustings in 2022. Uhuru's games with Azimio will not bear any sort of fruit beyond stymying District Focus Gachagua's stillborn ambitions and giving Uhuru something to do so that he doesn't lose any more of his good humour in his post-presidency.

ODM is paying attention to the wrong things instead of building a political machinery to replace the oversized influence of the late Raila Odinga. It is not recruiting new members. It doesn't appear to be raising a campaign war chest to defend the seats it holds, to take back the seats it lost in 2022 and 2017, or to poach the unsafe seats held by Azimio and Kenya Kwanza. It is sacking young men who had the measure of the party, who kept many of its secrets, and who executed many of its plans - and all because the party's ancien régime has its back up because Sifuna will not swear fealty to a decrepit political party infrastructure marching in the wrong direction. These are not serious people. They deserve to lose everything they hold dear.

Missing the mission for the wrong customs

Were the poor members of the Judicial Service Commission - and their long-suffering staff - ever to encounter my curriculum vitae, they will swiftly arrive at a terrible conclusion: while my confidence as a legal practitioner (though not a litigator of any kind of note) is unparalleled, my determination to eschew and elide many of their foibles and customs will horrify them to their very core. It is only this past week that I have had a chance to reacquaint myself with the expression "judgment per incuriam" and only because I was curious to confirm whether memories from twenty-one years ago were sharp as a tack or blunt as butterknife. I'll spare you the mystery: the memories are as blunt as a butterknife.

There was a recognition of the place of Gen Z in the judiciary. One of the members of the interview panel; declared that they form the majority of the workforce. The interviewers were obsessed with the question of how interviewees would manage this cohort of workers and it brought to my mind a sense of dread. No matter how had it has tried to demystify itself in the eyes of the public, the judiciary is stultifyingly bureaucratic, pigeonholing different cadres in neat boxes and bestowing on them qualities that satisfy the decision to pigeonhole them in the first place. I am, as my elected representatives tend to put it, of a contrary opinion.

All organisations have distinct cadres, with unique attributes and needs, and whose recruitments was undertaken to meet distant institutional needs. The aim of the institutional human capital development system is to forge them into a team and point them in the same direction. Institutional needs supersede demographic identities. Since the fateful anti-Finance-Bill-2024 "Gen Z protests", this demographic has been imbued with mysterious powers and bestowed with inexplicable needs, instead of seeing them as part of the continuum of public officers, an unbroken thread of recruits going back tot he founding of the Kenyan civil service. If change is to visit the judiciary, the change is to visit all cadres and hierarchies of the judiciary, to bring old doggies up-to-date with the artificial intelligence and ChatGPT world, and acculturate the Gen Z whippersnappers into the mysteries of the civil service. The aim, as always, is to forge a united workforce that is dedicated to achieving the institutional mission.

But in a Government festooned with buzzwords and "it" catchphrases, certain traditions are no longer followed, and the consequences are there to see: unhappy cadres at all levels of the civil services, dissatisfied at work, yet unable to depart for greener pastures because the world out there is wildly competitively cutthroat and only the most ruthless survive. Career in the "private sector" are quite often short-lived; the days of working for a single employer all through ones career are over. Indeed, more young people work more side hustles in a year than certain kinds of civil servants have done for thirty-five years.

And so in order to try and recreate customs long dead, there is a terrifyingly stuck-in-place generation of jurists who still cling onto a world where lawyer, and the advocates they became, memorised Latin phrases even if they no longer held onto the meaning behind the phrases. I could give you a reasoned explanation of why a court decision is considered invalid or not binding because it was made in ignorance or forgetfulness of a relevant statute or a binding precedent, leading to a demonstrably wrong conclusion, and why such a wrong decision would not be considered as precedent-setting. But I would not think it necessary, unless someone was truly determined to resurrect Cicero, to fall back on per incuriam to make my case.

Customs, particularly the customs of professions, must evolve. It is the only way that practitioners can keep up with a changing world. Principles, on the other hand - truth, justice, integrity, professionalism, hard work, dedication, honour - all those must hold strong. But, like the wigs and robes of yore, if you cling onto the wrong customs, you will draw the wrong lessons about the different cadres in your institution, and fall under the spell of catering to the needs of small, ill-defined fiefdoms - instead of building an effective institution to achieve a singular mission.